Speech to the CPUSA National Committee - June 18, 1945 : Earl Browder : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive

"Speech to the CPUSA National Committee - June 18, 1945

by Earl Browder

Reprinted from "Discussion Bulletin No. 9." San Francisco: California State Committee, CPA, July 1945; pp. 1-3, 6, 8.

This is a massively long defense of the wartime policies of his administration by recently cashiered General Secretary Earl Browder. Browder makes his defense by reciting a massive number of quotations from his own wartime speeches and writings as well as two from Lenin -- this endless regurgitation representing well over half of the 9500-word excerpt here.

Stripping away his self-congratulatory bluster, Browder's basic argument is that "The basic soundness of American Communists' wartime policy had not been directly challenged in the present discussion until the reports today." He holds that his uncontested policy was sound and rational, made necessary by the need to establish a Second Front in Europe and to support the Roosevelt administration against an alliance of Republican and conservative anti-Administration forces who were empowered in the rightward-tilting Congressional elections of 1942.

The lack of Democratic Party dynamism in the aftermath of the 1942 vote demonstrated "the Democratic Party could be the vehicle for a people's victory only when it was supplemented by independent organizations of labor and the people (including dissident Republicans), in a broad coalition," Browder declares.

Browder maintains the CPUSA's policy of guiding the labor movement to compliant support of the Roosevelt administration in matters of its personnel or policies was "entirely correct" since a militant policy would have resulted in a Dewey victory in 1944.

Browder acknowledges that "We have undoubtedly been suffering from a number of vulgarizations and distortions of our correct political line, which require correction," but argues that their correction can "only upon the foundation of that political line and not upon its abandonment." Browder rejects charges that the policies with he was associated were a manifestation of "revisionism," since "our policy since 1942 has been basically correct, has proved itself so in life, and has brought victories and advances in all fields to the nation and to the working class, including the matter from the change from Party to Association."

No copyright notice in original publication, published in USA between 1923 and 1978, public domain.

Scanned from an original in the Tim Davenport collection by Martin Goodman of the Riazanov Library Digitization Project. Additional editing by Tim Davenport.

Published by 1000 Flowers Publishing, Corvallis, OR, June 2012.

Uploaded to Archive.org by Tim Davenport ("Carrite") on June 5, 2012.

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Licenseurl:	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
Identifier:	SpeechToTheCpusaNationalCommittee-June181945
Identifier-access:	http://archive.org/details/SpeechToTheCpusaNationalCommittee-June181945
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Speech to the CPUSA National Committee - June 18, 1945

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